Making Play Streets Mean Streets

In December, two days after Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos from the 84th Precinct in Brooklyn were killed in a squad car by a man who had come from Baltimore having declared a violent will toward the police, Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke at a luncheon for the Police Athletic League. The league by then could trace its roots 100 years, having begun in 1914 when Police Commissioner Arthur Woods, an advocate for the poor who worried about the effects of tenement life on children, set about searching for vacant lots that could be converted to playgrounds.

The objective was twofold: to occupy children sufficiently enough that they would resist nefarious temptation, and to foster the kinds of relationships between young people and police officers that would keep whatever tensions might arise to a minimum.

At the time Mr. Woods embarked on this proposal, a police captain named John Sweeney had developed a program for young teenage boys on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that put them in uniforms for marching drills and set them on a course of running and swimming and learning first aid. By 1917, the program, known as the Junior Police, was operating in 32 precincts, with the even more ambitious goal of creating genuine bonds between underprivileged children and the men dispatched to regulate their behaviors.

Mayor de Blasio delivered his speech to the league in the midst of a series of fatalities at the hands of police officers that have come to define national debates about race and justice over the past year. “The work you do is a message to us all about where we need to go,” he told the audience. “The work of bringing police and community together is sacred.”

That work has arguably been more difficult to achieve in the wake of declining public money, over many years, funneled to the league. From the beginning, one of the league’s signature initiatives has been the play street, closing off blocks in high-crime neighborhoods to create safe recreational spaces, where there are few, during the summer. They have been a place for children to see law enforcers in an avuncular frame of mind. Robert M. Morgenthau, the former Manhattan district attorney, who has served on the board of the Police Athletic League for more than 50 years, always visits the play streets on the day they open. They require permits and funding. Last year there were 50 play streets; at a high, about 15 years ago, there were three times as many. Then, the city’s Housing Authority was funding about 60 of them; as its financial troubles have mounted, it has been able to support fewer and fewer. Last year, a spokesman for the league said, it could fund only 10.

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In July 2012, Robert M. Morgenthau, the league chairman, and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly were in Harlem for the start of the summer play streets.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

In the decades since the league was created in New York, Police Athletic Leagues have formed in cities around the country. Diminishing resources have clearly caused problems elsewhere. In the impoverished Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray, the man who died after a ride in a police van last month, came of age, a Police Athletic League center closed a few years ago. Political fights surrounding the passage of President Bill Clinton’s crime bill in 1994 meant that the final legislation left little money for the kind of preventive policing the league practiced.

“The cutback in federal money has really hurt us,” Mr. Morgenthau said. “People said, ‘They have money in there for midnight basketball, how ridiculous can you get?’ ” Police officers would engage with children as coaches. “It was a tragedy that they said recreation wasn’t crime prevention,” he continued. “I went down to Washington to lobby and got nowhere.” In 1991, Mr. Morgenthau had taken a girls’ track team and a boys’ basketball team from league programs to the Soviet Union to compete, but money for those sorts of expeditions disappeared as well.

Most of the government money the league receives in New York comes through contracts to run early-childhood and after-school programs. The league raises about $26 million a year through these contracts as well as foundation grants and individual donations. It spends everything it earns; it has no endowment and gets no money from the Police Department. This year, the department disbanded its liaison unit, which had provided every Police Athletic League center in the city its own dedicated officer. The change was a result of a reorganization of its community affairs bureau, the Police Department said, but one that has seemed tone deaf to the current civic trauma.

In New York, the Police Athletic League is newly run by Frederick Watts, a former Manhattan prosecutor and the son of a detective. It is his wish to have more police officers at after-school activities, police officers teaching children how to use computers, police officers interacting with children positively on a regular basis.

“It’s hard to pull an officer off a radio run for a suspected crime to go to a talent show; I get that,” Mr. Watts said. “With street encounters in the inner city, you’re meeting someone in an emotional circumstance and everything becomes charged, and the kid, usually a teenager, is often encountering a police officer for the first time. This all sounds like soft stuff, but I have a lot of experience with police officers, with kids and their parents, and when things have been done right, even when terrible things happen, you can enter the dialogue in a more constructive way.”

In the 1980s, when Michael Blue Williams, the music-industry manager who has overseen the career of Outkast among others, was growing up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, he started to go to a police athletic center on Webster Avenue when he sensed he was on the verge of getting into trouble. “I distinctly remember one day I hopped the train, I jumped the turnstile,” Mr. Williams told me recently. “A cop came up to me and asked me where I was coming from. I said the P.A.L. He said, ‘They teach you this at P.A.L.?’ And then he let me go because he understood that the bad kids weren’t going to the P.A.L.”